Virasat

A playful heritage site for learning about Indian cities, starting with Udaipur and Kolkata. Visitors pick a city, and Gaju the elephant walks them there. A pigeon flies in with a sealed scroll; they log in to break the seal, read the city's letter, then follow the scroll's twine down through a timeline of the city's history until it draws the outline of the city. Points are collected in their Virasat passport.

Live site: https://www.virasatinfo.in (the old address https://virasat-psi.vercel.app still works) · Editor page: https://www.virasatinfo.in/admin

How it is built

A frontend (the website), a backend API (the rules) and a Postgres database (all the content, accounts and points), with the site on Vercel and the database on Neon (both free plans). Facts only appear on the site after a second teammate has checked the source and verified them.

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: how the whole thing works, in plain words. Start here, and use it to explain the project.
• docs/EDITOR-GUIDE.md: for teammates adding and checking facts. No coding needed.
• docs/DEVELOPER-GUIDE.md: running it locally, adding tables, routes and cities.
• docs/LANGUAGE-CHOICES.md: the programming-language ideas behind the code, for the viva.
• docs/OWNERSHIP.md: who owns and explains each part.

Quick start (developers)

npm install
npm run dev     # http://localhost:3024
npm test

Good to know

• Images: files live in Cloudinary and the database keeps only their links and credits. Set CLOUDINARY_URL on Vercel (or the three parts CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME, CLOUDINARY_API_KEY, CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET); each production build then runs scripts/cloudinary-sync.js, which uploads the team's artwork (city stamps and posters) and copies any photo still linked elsewhere (Wikimedia Commons) into Cloudinary, keeping the original link beside it. Editors can upload photos on the editor page. Gaju (assets/gaju.webp) and the white dove that carries the scroll (assets/dove.webp) ship with the site. The arrival scenes are drawn in code (server/public/js/hero.js).
• Signing in: the scroll asks visitors to sign in before it opens. Google sign-in (button plus One Tap) is the main way once GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID is set on Vercel; email and password stays as the fallback. Phone login runs as a demo (code shown on screen) only while Google is not set up; DEMO_PHONE_LOGIN=on or off overrides that.
• Admin emails: anyone who signs in with Google using an address in the admin_emails table (or the ADMIN_EMAILS setting) becomes an admin and sees the Admin page link in the menu. Password accounts never count, because their email was never checked.